Preserving Europe's audiovisual heritage

Through audio-visual technology the 20th Century provided us with a new kind of heritage. Broadcasting institutions face a massive problem preserving these early audiovisual programmes, many of which are stored on fast-deteriorating film and reel-to-reel magnetic tape. Around half of European broadcasting archives from the early twentieth century are thought to be under threat of loss by media deterioration and equipment obsolescence. Such archives represent a vitally important part of our cultural heritage. Current preservation techniques used for audiovisual media are expensive and time-consuming. PRESTO, a project under IST-FP5, looked at the digitisation process used to preserve broadcast archives and transfer the content to digital media. It focused on making the archival process quicker and more efficient, through greater automation and more cost-effective use of new technologies. PRESTO called its approach to the problem the "Preservation Factory".This solution establishes a dedicated project team and equipment that can be used full-time, together with automated methods of process control, tracking and bar-coding as an alternative to the ad-hoc methods that have been used to date. Using such methods, project participants were able to reduce the cost of the digitisation process by up to 50 per cent.